From the pages of my notebooks - Ideas that got the chop.

My phone did this when I wasn’t looking

Ships and boats really get me going. Long and elegant from one angle, squat and robust from another; they represent a nostalgic way to travel where instead of being cosseted away one’s senses are assaulted by the journey. The travel is about taking time away from everything and seeing the world at a remove. These mechanical Jonah’s whales battle their way though the seas to deliver those in their bellies.

Mid twentieth century ships particularly excite me with their proud bows vertically rising from the point where they obtusely cleave the water apart. They make no concession to ergonomic theory or streamlining. Everything is upright and proper.

My wife has tasked me with applying my carpentry skills to the task of designing and building a laundry cabinet. Each set of laundry must be separated. I intend to make it in pine with hand painted doors on each segment. I will finally laquer the doors for a high gloss wipe-clean finish. Here is a preliminary drawing for the whites section.

I have long had an interest in purely geometric type. I enjoy taking straight lines and pure curves and forming letters from them. I get really irritated by the oft-repeated typographic catchphrase “A straight line is a dead line”. No its not. Its the shortest, most economical, logical distance from one point to another. This is an early example of a face I worked on based on this principle.

Since then I have been irked by this piece. It is only legible when used as a titling face and is strictly incoherent and unreadable in any form even nearly approaching body copy. I began to wonder could a font be created that is entirely logical in its construction? It would need to be usable in all sizes and in any situation. FF DIN is about as close to this idea as I could find. Yet it still has its “illogical” idiosyncracies that help it retain some humanity.

I now want to design a font that reflects our concerns as a race going into the future – it needs to be entirely logical, can appear in print from small print to poster headlines, on the side of children’s bicycles to the side of a space fleet that travels the galaxy. Most importantly it needs to be economically minded in its use of resources, which is to say it must have as few lines as possible so as to use as little ink as possible. Where to start? Well, by trying to figure out what the essence of our alphabet is. How much and what bits can a letter afford to lose?

My dad as he might appear if he were a grumpy old character from Asterix.